Each day, thousands of trucks travel over the nation's highways towing thousands of cargo trailers carrying millions of dollars worth of cargo. At any given time, many thousands more cargo trailers are not connected to trucks, but are parked in storage lots after decoupling from the trucks that towed them to their current locations, awaiting connection to the trucks that will tow them to their next destinations. Keeping track of the status and location of each of these thousands of cargo trailers represents a significant record-keeping burden for shipping, trucking and logistics companies.
What is needed is a system for providing automatic, seamless and reliable communications between trucks and the trailers to which they are connected, between trailers and a central monitoring station of a monitoring service provider, and between trucks and the central monitoring station for the reporting of location and status information.